Tag: jean liedloff

AJA talk. The Two Old Friends and Snow White.

Here are two stories which illustrate narcissistic and borderline personality structures respectively. We’ll begin with the stories themselves, and how their similarity suggests a common developmental origin in childhood. Then we’ll look at how their divergence from one another shows up at the developmental threshold of symbol formation and finally how they differ with reference to feelings of guilt and shame.

The Two Old Friends.

There were once two old friends who lived on different sides of the mountain. One of the old friends was so hungry he decided to go out into the forest to see if he could find some nuts but all he found were oak apples. He thought he’d go down into the village and try to sell them anyway. Perhaps some idiot would buy them. Meantime, the other old friend was so hungry he had gone out in search of poppy seeds. He came home empty handed but filled up his sack with ashes, thinking to go and dupe some poor fool in the village below. 

Half way there the two old friends bumped into each other. They clapped one another on the back and boasted a bit about how wonderful life was on their respective sides of the mountain. Finally, they came up with the brilliant idea that they would swop the sacks and save themselves a journey down into the village which, in any case, surely didn’t merit being graced by their presence. So each returned home chuckling about how they had outsmarted the other.

When the first old friend got home he opened up his sack of poppy seeds to discover nothing but ashes. He was furious and ran around the mountain armed with a rake to teach the other old friend a lesson. When the other old friend got home he opened his sack of nuts to find only oak apples. Enraged, he grabbed a hoe and rushed around the mountain to demand justice. When they met in the middle they beat one another black and blue before dissolving into laughter.

”I never could cheat you brother!’

‘No, and I never could cheat you….’

So they decided to go cheat someone else together, two heads being better than one, and hired themselves out to a rich man for a few days thinking that when they got paid they might see where he kept his money. Sure enough, when the time came, the rich man drew up some gold from his well and so that night the two old friends snuck into his garden to liberate the remainder. 

One old friend lowered the other old friend down into the well where he filled up his sack with gold but not to the brim. He knew full well he would be left behind if he sent the gold up first so he left room for himself and climbed in after. Sure enough, once the gold was hoisted up, the old friend set off at speed, with no more thought for the other old friend until he popped his head out of the sack, thanking him for the ride. The old friend was so exhausted from all this effort of carrying both gold and man he set down to rest and soon fell asleep whereupon the other old friend shouldered the gold and slipped away.

When the old friend woke and found the gold missing he connived a cunning plan. He tied a thread to a stick and cracked it like a whip as though leading an ox and cart. He knew the other old friend was lazy and would wait for the prospect of a free ride. Sure enough, around the bend of the lane sat the other old friend with his thumb out. He was so tired from his exertions that he had fallen asleep with all the waiting. So the old friend now took back the gold and ran all the way home, telling his wife to hide it in her wooden chest and bury him in a shallow grave so that the other old friend would think him dead. 

When the old friend arrived he was shocked to find the weeping wife, then suspicious, but also moved by the woman’s tears. Perhaps he was a bit upset himself now and so they wept together long and hard for the demise of the old friend. Then the old friend asked to see the other old friend’s grave to pay his respects. The clearly hasty arrangement of things aroused his suspicions once more and so he began to make sounds like an angry bull about the mound of earth until the other old friend cried out in fright and leapt up from his pit.

‘Don’t tread on me, my old friend will find me.!

‘I found you already old friend..’

The old friend shook the earth from his clothes and the other old friend dusted him down, meanwhile his wife dragged out the gold and divided it all evenly between them.

……………………………………………………

Snow White.

Our second story, Snow White, has a different kind of splitness and fragmentation.

A Queen dies giving birth to a princess, as white as snow, as red as blood and as black as ebony wood. The King soon married again, a proud and vain woman who hated Snow White and wanted her dead. The Queen had a magic mirror which she would consult, asking, ‘Mirror mirror on the wall who is the fairest of us all?’ And each time the mirror would reply. ‘Thou, oh Queen, are fairest of all.’ One day she asked and it spoke differently..

”The queen was fairest yesterday,
But Snow-White is fairest now.”

The furious Queen ordered a huntsman to take Snow White into the woods and kill her, bringing back her lungs and liver as a token. But the huntsman let her go out of pity. He returned with the lungs and liver of a boar he’d killed instead which the Queen promptly had Cook prepare with parsley and a light balsamic glaze. Once she had cleansed her pallet she again went to the magic mirror and was astounded to hear it tell her..

“O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
Snow-White is still alive and well,
And none is so fair as she.”

The Queen disguised herself as an old peddler and went to the dwarves cottage, crying: “Pretty things to sell, very cheap, very cheap.” Snow-White unbolted the door and let her in. “Child,” said the old woman, “what a fright you look; come, I will lace you properly for once.” But the old woman laced her so quickly and so tightly that Snow-White lost her breath and fell down as if dead. “Now I am the most beautiful,” cackled the Queen to herself, and ran away.

The seven dwarfs came home just in time to resuscitate her.

When the wicked witch went back to the mirror it answered as before…

“O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
Snow-White is still alive and well,
And none is so fair as she.”

So then she made a poisonous comb and went knocking once more. When Snow White let her in, she said: “Now I will comb you properly for once.” Hardly had she put the comb in her hair than the poison in it took effect, and the girl fell down senseless. The dwarfs again returned just in time to remove the comb and save her.

When the Queen got home she again consulted the mirror which answered as before;

“O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
Snow-White is still alive and well,
And none is so fair as she.”

When she heard this the wicked queen quivered with rage. “Snow-White shall die,” she cried, “even if it costs me my life!” Whereupon she went into a secret, lonely room and there she made a very poisonous apple. When it was ready she dressed herself like a peasant and called upon Snow White once more who hardly had more than a bite of it than she fell down dead. And when the Queen again asked of the looking-glass….

“Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Who in this land is the fairest of all?”

it answered at last—

“Thou, O Queen, art the fairest of all.”

Then her envious heart had rest, in so far as an envious heart can have rest.

The grief stricken dwarfs made Snow White a transparent coffin of glass and they laid her in it. They wrote her name upon it in golden letters and took it in turns to watch over her. One day, a king’s son came into the forest and was amazed at the glass coffin with the beautiful Snow-White inside. He begged the dwarves to let him have her, so struck was he by her beauty and had it carried away by his servants on their shoulders. It then just so happened that one of them stumbled over the root of a tree and jolted the coffin. The shock dislodged the poisonous piece of apple caught in Snow White’s throat and before long she opened her eyes and was once more alive.

“Oh, heavens! where am I?” cried she. The King’s son, full of joy, replied, “You are with me.” And soon they came to be married with great show and splendour.

The Old Queen was invited to the wedding and when she arrived… they were waiting for her. Iron slippers had already been put upon a roaring fire. The red hot shoes were brought over with tongs, and set before her. Then she was made to put them on and dance until she dropped down dead.

Fairytales as psychological paradigms.

I bought these two stories as playful ways of thinking about Narcissistic and Borderline structures. In the story of the Old Friends we have all the rivalry, deception, manipulation and seduction of narcissism. In Snow White we have the denial, splitting and envious spoiling associated with a borderline adaptation.

Adhesive Anxiety.

You will be familiar with Bowlby’s attachment styles, though this may well hamper any efforts to think about which particular attachment styles might give rise to either narcissistic or borderline phenomena. We are happily saved from this dilemma by the work of Esther Bick who introduced the concept of adhesive attachment in the 1960s as part of her work on early infant development, particularly in her paper “The Experience of the Skin in Early Object Relations” (1968). She used the term adhesive identification or adhesive attachment to describe an earlier primitive mode of relating in which the infant relies on physical contact prior to any differentiation between self and other.’

Bick proposes that the skin is the infant’s earliest symbol and experience of containment. It is not only a biological boundary but a sensory modality of cohesion, safety, and “being held together.” which keeps the infant’s experience organised.

If the time and quality of being in arms dips below a certain threshold, the infant’s parts are left feeling as though they have no binding force amongst themselves. The infant must then develop a compensatory ‘second skin’, a defensive structure which forms when it experiences:

  • unreliable holding
  • emotional unavailability alternating with
  • overstimulation
  • inadequate or ‘over’ containment of distress.

Adhesive attachment is thus a response to a certain kind of maternal holding, grandiose and encapsulated in the face of intrusive absence, fragile and enmeshed in the face of envious spoiling. It is a response to the severing of what Jean Liedloff would call the ‘continuum concept’, the essential containment of skin to skin contact which ensures confidence, coherence and going on being.

These two different ways in which the continuum is interrupted evoke distinct compensatory patterns of idealisation which shape future development. The ‘too loose hold mother’ idealises the child to bridge the gap, but, as Schwarz-Salant reminds us, it comes in the form of, ‘you’re wonderful but I hate you for it,’ giving rise to later splits in the nascent ego. The ‘too tight hold mother’, idealises herself with ‘though you’re an encumbrance I can heroically bear with it,’ giving later rise to a dread of autonomy and the terror of envious attack.

How does this pertain to the story of the Two Old Friends?

The two old friends are poor. They have nothing but the clothes on their backs and no food to eat. Their compulsive cheating is born of deprivation. The backdrop of this story is one of maternal neglect and subsequent impoverishment of inner resources. The internalised mother as nourishing object is nowhere to be seen. Developmentally, she is insubstantial and cannot provide sufficient cohesion for the infant’s interior world, giving rise to an experience of self which Bruno Bettelheim describes as ‘the empty fortress’, characterised by self-aggrandisement and defensive fortifications.

The mountain between the old friends suggests separation, but they remain psychically glued in endless rivalry, in place of I and Thou, compulsively repeating the same patterns of betrayal, anger, and identification. Their fused, symbiotic arrangement means the old friends cannot genuinely relate to one another. They cannot establish a stable boundary between self and other. Fraudulent interactions are structured to serve and maintain the self’s omnipotent position rather than to promote mutuality.

Jung saw narcissism as an inflated, defensive ego which resists deeper self-awareness, hindering true psychological growth and individuation. The theft of the rich man’s gold captures this sense of arrogating the numinosity of the Self to partial ego states. Otto Kernberg emphasises the ‘use of others as instruments….. as tools for the maintenance of self‐esteem or the grandiose self, rather than as partners in a genuine relationship of mutuality.” (p. 123) Ledermann advances Kernberg’s thinking, ‘lack of love for oneself and concomitant feelings of aloofness arise as an early defence against the terror of not being able to be related to and of non-existing’. “I am afraid’, says Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘they might someday find out that there’s nothing inside me, that I am only the skin of someone, and that inside, under my arm, perhaps, there’s nothing but emptiness.”

The old friends’ beatings and quarrels do not break their bond, they reinforce it,
acting like the “positive reinforcing function of negative attention” (Gallimore, Tharp & Kemp. 1969) When skin to skin needs are unmet by nurture they must be set in place by other means. Aldous Huxley makes the brilliant observation in ‘Chrome Orange’ that the nascent Central American Republics went to war with one another after gaining independence from Spain (15th Sept 1821), in order to know themselves as nations. Indigenous culture had been eroded by colonisers who, now too, were no longer. This crisis of cultural identity and the need for internal cohesion was resolved by going to war with one another, each waving their flag, freshly filled with the glue of patriotic fervour and sticking together.

Adhesive Attachment in Snow White.

The Queen does not relate to Snow White as an autonomous other but as a thing to which she is glued in psychic obligation and by whom her ontological status has been relegated. Snow White’s autonomy is intolerable because it undermines the sense of enmeshment which maintains cohesion. Snow White’s ‘fairness’ doesn’t just offend the Queen, it collapses the pre-eminent self-structure which gives the Queen meaning. She has no alternative source of worth beyond the impulse to eclipse, no purpose beyond domination.

Alchemically, Snow White’s red, white and black nature point to her psychic wholeness which the Queen can neither attain nor tolerate. The Queen’s wish to eclipse and erase Snow White is a desperate effort to destroy anything which might upset the hegemony upon which her identity has come to depend.

The Queen’s adhesive wish to devour Snow White’s lungs and liver seem especially significant. In antiquity the liver was the seat of feeling, hence Prometheus’ poetic punishment of having his liver repeatedly eaten for daring to have compassion for humanity expressed by his theft of fire. The lungs serve pneuma, the spirit, and so the Queen’s destructive incorporation constitutes an attack on the emotional and spiritual vitality of the child, an enactment of her desire to internalise qualities lacking in herself.

Erasing and incorporating is how the wicked witch preserves her sense of self. I came across an example in the street the other day. A mother is striding along at great speed. Her three year old is running to keep up. She asks angrily, ‘Why are you running?’ He replies, ‘because I am not.’ To remain congruent with mother’s denial of reality, that he’s having to run to keep up with her, he has to deny it himself, even if this gobbles up his embodied experience.

Fordham’s “symbol formation.”

Now let’s think about the emerging differences between the stories as they approach the threshold of symbol formation. For Fordham the Self is a primary, innate totality which de-integrates and re-integrates through-out development. Symbol formation is the psychic activity by which these de-integrations and re-integrations are managed, linking inner and outer worlds.

‘My interior,’ says Jung in the Red Book, ‘gives birth to the children of chaos of the primordial mother. He who enters the crater also becomes chaotic matter, he melts. The formed in him dissolves and binds itself anew with the children of chaos.’ (p179)

Fordham’s ideas about de-integration and re-integration illustrate the psyche’s innate capacity for self-healing by describing a dynamic process through which the self continually disassembles and reorganises its structures in response to inner and outer experiences. Thus, symbol formation exercises the self’s developmental potential, its ability to transform raw experience into meaning and is predicated, to paraphrase Katerina Serafidou, on loss; a recognition that giving credence to the sovereignty of others is the price we pay for exercising our own.

Symbol Formation and the Two Old Friends.

The two old friends operate almost entirely on the level of the concrete and pre-symbolic. The exchange of sacks, nuts for oak apples, poppy seeds for ashes, is fraudulent, a distortion of symbolic exchange. That which purports to be nourishing is not. They cannot imagine meaning beyond the object itself. So they enact transactional trickery and theft in place of imaginative transformation. When my younger brother was about six or seven he took a ten pound note from my mother’s purse and encouraged his friend next door to do the same. They then swopped the notes so it wasn’t stealing any more. They were so sure of themselves that they proudly announced what they had done and were most upset when no one else thought them quite so clever.

Failure to Internalise the Other.

Symbol formation requires internalising a loving object but the two old friends have none and so can only exist through physical confrontation or fraudulent exchange. Their encounter has the effect of confirming isolation rather than alleviating it because every transaction is an exercise in deceit. They “know” themselves through either competitive rivalry or identifying with one another rather than via intersubjective recognition. Every affect (shame, anger, greed) must be acted out as hitting, swapping, or stealing.

Symbol formation requires a capacity for inner space, the ability to tolerate separation between ego and Self, subject and object. Narcissistic structures tend to collapse this space. Symptomatic lack of empathy is more deeply rooted in a failure to experience the other as sufficiently their own person to have feelings about them in the first place.

Death and rebirth.

Symbol formation finally occurs with the dusting down of the old friend following his interment, a gesture which acknowledges and validates the subjective needs of the other. This can occur once the cycle of trickery is broken by the old friend handing over the gold to his wife for safe keeping. It’s a crucial moment in the story because it introduces the possibility of a mediating third who both takes the gold in and gives it back in a differentiated (shareable) form. This can happen once the old friend has experienced the de-integration and re-integration of death and rebirth sufficiently to enable sharing.

The motif of burial as a metaphor for the crossing of developmental thresholds is to be found in the initiation rituals of many indigenous cultures. Symbolic burial represents a creative regression into the womb of the Earth. In ‘Symbols of Transformation’ Jung repeatedly develops the idea that regression is not merely pathological but a necessary precondition for further psychological development. Throughout the “Hymn of Creation” and “Sacrifice” chapters Jung argues that regression toward the mother-symbol is teleological, not merely infantile. In his essay, ‘On Psychic Energy’, in vol 8 he says, “From [this] standpoint the libido regresses to the imago of the mother in order to find there the memory associations by means of which further development can take place…” Jung is wanting to contrast regression which becomes transformative because it can be symbolised and regression which remains trapped in repetitive enactment because it is not.

Developmentally, both the wooden chest and the earthen grave suggest Winnicott’s concept of “maternal reverie”, the process by which a mother takes in the infant’s raw emotional experience, processes it internally, and returns it in a more manageable form. Her wooden chest and the earthen grave are ”holding environments,” psychological spaces within which the infant’s unintegrated anxieties can be contained and transformed through her empathic responsiveness. The old friends are mostly stuck in their repetition compulsion until a containing third gets involved and their closed circuit can become transformed into a developmental arc.

The final division of the gold is thus not merely a moral ending. It is the symbolic fruit of a regression that has finally become developmental rather than merely repetitive. The circular economy of narcissistic trickery gives way to a new psychic organisation centred on participation rather than possession.

Snow White and symbol formation.

It seems the brothers Grimm were struggling with their own capacity for symbol formation in the early editions of their work. In the first 1812 edition the wicked witch is Snow White’s own biological mother. By 1819, in the second edition, the birth mother dies and a step mother is given the status of wicked witch. This alteration seems to reflect society’s increasing tendency to idealise motherhood by displacing destructive maternal impulses onto third parties. The 1812 text is arguably the more psychologically striking version, because the “Terrible Mother” and the “Good Mother” are united in a single figure rather than being split between mother and stepmother. In the second edition the murderous maternal impulses are denied, split off and projected.

The Queen, as destructive maternal introject, harries the child’s emerging autonomy, enviously attacking her in order to split off psychic pain which cannot be consciously represented or symbolised. Such denial both negates and depersonalises in the same breath. It is helped to do so by what Meltzer and Segal call concrete equation thinking, the confusion of symbol and thing, or of being and behaviour. The Queen doesn’t just envy Snow White’s beauty; she equates it with life itself. To destroy Snow White is to do more than rid herself of a rival, it is to ensure ontological security rooted in the wish to dominate and control.

The Queen cannot distinguish being admired from being alive; or being eclipsed from being annihilated. Hence her terrifying conviction, if Snow White lives, I die. She must succeed in her quest to kill Snow White, ‘even if it cost me my life’ because there is no symbolic space to separate self from other. This is managed instead by the systemic shaming that splitting entails and that suffuses their interaction, ‘what a fright you look, I will lace you properly for once.’ Her need to diminish and extinguish seem to be fundamental to her own inner peace. She achieves this by getting the child to believe that she is doing her a favour. ‘Being helped’ and feeling guilty begin to blend in deadly poison to eros and autonomy. The problem is not too much defensive closure as with the two Old Friends, but too much psychic permeability and fragmentation.

Shame and Guilt.

We could say that the two old friends lack empathy but I wonder if this misses the mark somewhat. The failure of empathy feels symptomatic of something more fundamental; the realm of I and thou has yet to be inhabited. It’s not that cheating feels either wrong or justified, it’s simply that cheating failed to work. The two old friends are pre-moral rather than amoral. The concept of being-with is reduced to, ‘you’re with me or against me’. The choice is between identification or enmity. This is manifest initially as the shared projection of inferiority onto the villagers they separately hope to fool, then, upon one another and finally upon the rich man whom they seem to feel deserves being robbed.

There is no guilt about any of this. In every instance guilt is warded off and converted into the active shaming of third parties. There is as yet not enough differentiation out of what Masud Khan would call ‘symbiotic omnipotence’ to exercise the distinction between subject and object upon which basis self reflection and moral consideration might be possible. Being and behaviour are still fused. This makes a mine field of personal accountability. Any criticism levelled at behaviour feels like a shaming attack levelled at the core of being. Persona, confused with the Self, cannot distinguish guilt from shame and so it has to be projected.

In Snow White, guilt and shame are treated very differently. Our heroine seems to have little capacity to defend herself from the envious shaming of the wicked queen. She even seems to invite attack, allowing her into the temenos of the dwarves cottage despite being expressly warned not to. She buys into the shaming condemnation of the wicked witch in line with Ferenczi’s ‘identification with the aggressor’. Ferenczi describes the child as becoming almost automatically attuned to what the aggressor wants, attempting to anticipate and gratify those wishes, effectively abandoning her own subjectivity in order to survive the relationship.

The borderline structure will thus assume guilt and blame, as a form of appeasing judgmental or destructive objects and warding off catastrophic expectations. The emotional dysregulation involved often has much to do with overwhelming feelings of responsibility, a form of plea bargaining to prevent abandonment. When Snow White is about to be killed by the huntsman there is no sense of her protest only of an appeal for mercy. When the WW comes calling at the cottage she feels she has to let her in despite her own experience which the Queen’s shaming of her further undermines.

Both Snow White and the two old friends demonstrate a curious ambiguity to the prospect of shame. Both parties are mobilised against it whilst subtly colluding with it. Whilst shame infuriates the two old friends they would rather be shamed than held accountable. Whilst shame tends to collapse Snow White she would rather be shamed than be abandoned.

The tendency of these two adaptations to share internal organisation around shame and the prospect of abandonment or humiliation respectively makes their interaction with one another somewhat complicated. Though both fall into denial they tend to do so in somewhat opposing ways. These differing defensive structures can then fit together in a mutually reinforcing dynamic. The borderline tends to carry guilt and shame internally, disowning aggression, competence and self sufficiency with which the narcissistic structure happily identifies to shore up fragile esteem whilst projecting shame, vulnerability, and dependency which the borderline individual, whose identity is already organised around expectations of defectiveness and abandonment, is especially susceptible. Such mutual projection, could be called a complementary system of projective identification, each person’s defensive organisation temporarily stabilises the other’s in a psychological version of the nursery rhyme about Jack Spratt and his wife;

‘Jack Spratt could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean, and so between the two of them, they licked the platter clean.’

Conclusion.

As useful as these stories are they do both seem incomplete. Even though the two old friends have learned to share there is still the sense that their theft of the gold remains unaddressed and that there is yet some reparation to be made with the rich man. The story seems to achieve further resolution in a later Grimm’s fairytale ‘The Stolen Farthings’, where a young ghost can only find peace and cease its haunting once the guilt of theft can be bought to light and deflating reparations made.

Similarly, whilst Snow White is liberated from the tyranny of the wicked queen her glass entombment has a different quality than the earthen grave of the old friend, suggesting preservation rather than transformation. Her situation is still unresolved insofar as she remains ideal which is perhaps why the further story of Snow White and Rose Red becomes necessary. In that story clearly differentiated sisters co-operate to deal with an ungrateful dwarf who seems to represent the unintegrated envious aspects of the wicked queen left hanging over from the previous fairytale. The sisters befriend a bear with whom they are able to play aggressively without destroying the relationship. It is the bear who ultimately deals with the dwarf though the girls create the relational conditions within which the dwarf’s power can be overcome. The feminine is no longer represented by a single idealised protagonist. It has become two legitimate forms of femininity. The dwarf, unlike the Queen, leaves behind a treasure, so some value is derived from the difficult encounter above and beyond the relief of a happy ending.

Bad Baby.

Children need attention. If they don’t get it they will create it. The badly behaved child has simply had to resort to extreme measures in order to elicit something from otherwise empty vessels.

Even dog trainers know this.

It’s the owner.

The ‘naughty child’ is then rewarded in his efforts with shaming, which, though it has a pitiful prognosis, still gives emotional impoverishment a nucleus around which to cobble some semblance of going-on-being.

The problem with this, the price to be paid, is that such a child must then continue to behave in a way that elicits shaming in order to confirm their identity and continue to shore up that poorly self construct.

The Rule of Intentionality says that things have a way of panning out as they are supposed to. If you married someone who runs you down, then they are fulfilling a sacred service and ought to be paid. If you wake up after a drinking binge full of remorse and self loathing then that’s the purpose of getting so drunk. Many a junkie is equally addicted to the identity of being failed and shameful, formed way before they ever laid hands on their poison and much more difficult to give up.

Fulfilling expectation is instinctual. The Psyche takes a bet that baby will be born into adequate environs. Neural pathways are wide open to any signal or stimulus that gives baby information about herself on the basic assumption of a good enough environment that she’s hardwired to expect.

So the child attributes parental failing to herself. The parent is full of distaste because baby is distasteful. So that’s what she has to be. And sometimes it’s so close that you can’t see it. In fact it..

”may go unnoticed for the simple reason that s/he cannot conceive of an alternative kind of relation of Self to Other.” Jean Liedloff.

The feeling of intrinsic shame cannot be readily endured and so the Psyche grabs hold of the next best thing to bonding which is to identify with mother instead. She accepts the booby prize of being special, more like sisters now, which both hammers a few rusty sheets to her ramshakle hovel and shields her from the shame that underpins it, now invisible but still an enduring structure in the Psyche. Whilst being special and praised for all kinds of other things that have little to do with you may get you through the day, the underlying need to confirm the shame is biding its time.

”Instinctive forces do not reason. They assume the immense weight of their experience of Nature’s ways that it will serve the individual to be stabilized according to his initial experience.” ibid

So even though the narcissistic character is full of vanity and bluster, full of the archetypal power of mummy, consumed with specialness, so is he compelled by yet a deeper force to end up in the gutter one way or another, to bungle life despite himself.

In my opinion this is why Mr Trump seemingly does everything to hasten his own demise. Alienating his own secret service, making enemies of people who have dirt on him. He’s mocked for doing stupid things. These stupid things have an agenda, the end game of which looks like self-destructiveness but they might actually serve to keep him out of hospital. In the meantime the mockery and vilification will do nicely.

Sometimes things don’t make sense until you include in the mix a need to be scorned and hated. The apparent goal of domination and control is actually the means to an end, to obtain that which serves internal security better than loyalty, philanthropy or crushing your enemies. Humiliation.

Who is a stinky baby!

And so while it seems that fate comes to him from the outside, from the woodwork, from people dishing enough dirt, enough stink; it has all been carefully if unconsciously orchestrated and for a while shame and specialness will share the stage in a masochistic self-immolation of First and Only.

While all this entertainment is going down the rest of us run the risk of forgetting that Mr. Trump is a symbol. He is an expression of the Collective Psyche, the natural product of a culture that denigrates Mothering and rejects the Divine Feminine. This cancer runs through all of us Chosen People. Are you not special? Do you not have a political system so superior that it is exported through the bomb bay doors of Magnanimous Benevolence killing other mothers and babies for their own good every day of the week?

or at least if there is profit in it?

Strangely the number of enemies killed by our generous instruction in Afghanistan these last couple of years is not as high as the number of our own soldiers committing suicide in the privacy of their barracks.

Not to mention a hundred people a day in America alone who die of opioid overdose and the fifty thousand others a year that find more creative ways of commiting suicide in the face of unbearable shame.

Why else does a person kill themselves if not because they can no longer hold up their head? Behind all the Western facade of technological and moral superiority lurks a syndrome whose ultimate purpose is dark implosion.

and its way bigger than Trump.

Shame is systemic in our culture. If we do not wish to be ruled by tyrants then getting rid of them is only the beginning.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

 

Healing Phobic Anxiety.

The knee jerk response to Phobia is to try and overcome it. You want to wrestle it to the floor, all helped along with how irrational and stupid it seems to be, adding the weight of shame to the burden of anxiety.

Phobias are like waking dreams, things that don’t make apparent sense and yet are full of rich symbolism, brimming with meaning for anyone brave enough to refrain from instantly running it through with a pointy stick.

People have very particular phobias about all kinds of things, each of which has a specific set of associations, memories, and life events connected to it that provide context, significance and even the psychological necessity for what appears to be nonsense to the dismissive eye.

Phobos was the Greek God of Fear, and as with all ancient tales and myths we can find out a great deal about ourselves and our afflictions by taking his circumstances to heart. Phobos, twined with Deimos (terror) was the son of Ares, God of War and Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Procreation. Phobos personified the fear bought about by war (Ares), and conflict of any kind. Aphrodite was his mother, the dark side of whom is not-being-there. Thirteen kids, countless lovers, a jealous husband whose thing is weaponry…  So fearful Phobos and terrified Deimos were also the boy-Gods of loss.

Phobias are connected to the prospect of conflict and the subsequent loss that is wedded to it. And not just about who gets the window seat, but about whether you get to ride at all.

”Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.” CG Jung.

Much of what we fear is on account of its capacity to change us, to upset identity, to alter the status quo. Its not just that it’s ugly or full of teeth but that the encounter is game changing and you may need to check your name tag for a while thereafter.

Add to this the early encounter with Aphrodite, quietly resentful of being a brood mare, secretly loading the child with unfulfilled ambition, unsatisfied longing, the need to be redeemed by heroic action, already at odds with the child’s own destiny before s/he can crawl….

Fear of conflict is rooted in our survival instincts, which is not about the superficial tussle of who said what to whom, but about whether you exist as a person in your own right or as a part-object in someone else’s world. If asserting your own path through the jungle entails damage to parental love, if you are not the child your parents wanted, the child that would fulfill their hopes and dreams, then the desire to be recognized and the wish to be approved of are going to be in terrible, unbearable, collision with one another.

Our instinct to live up to expectation, even the absurd and ridiculous ones, is hardwired into the psyche because it’s connected to the basic assumption that parental expectations are there to promote survival. I am what I see in mother’s face. So that I must become. People pursue even destructive myths about themselves as if they were the holy grail, in order to maintain the conditions in which they first learned to feel at home.

Author Jean Liedloff  describes how the Chicago Fire dept was snow bound one winter and put out an emergency radio broadcast warning people not to set fire to their homes. House fires dropped to zero. Then the snows melted, the fire trucks got back in service, vigilance was called off and house fires resumed.

When the instinct to individuate collides with the instinct to live up to expectation, it can all be too great to bear, like your home going up in smoke. So it condenses, a super saturated solution of tension suddenly crystalizing around a symbol which now contains all the conflict and angst, and which you can keep at arms length for some of the time.

Phobos’ uniform presence in the myths is that his face was painted onto the shields of great heroes, like Hercules and Agamemnon.

”Staring backwards with eyes that glowed with fire. His mouth was full of teeth in a white row, fearful and daunting”… Hesiod.

Phobia is a shield, protecting heroic vulnerability. Legitimate but unacknowledged suffering retreats behind it, occluding the puzzle of how to be with other people, inherited from both Love and War.

The Psyche’s phobic solution, to parcel these fears down into objects that can be outside is really useful, provided you can stay away from its homing instinct .  Aspects of self taken flight invariably return to roost.

It’s important that Phobos is one of twins. Jung was of the opinion that twins indicated a quickening of consciousness, a doubling of the energies. Many traditions depict twins increasing consciousness or generating life.

The Xingu people of Brazil have stories about the twin brothers Kuat and Iae, who compelled the vulture king Urubutsin to give light to the dark world. Kuat occupied the sun, Iae the moon. Their wakefulness keeps light in the world except for a brief time each month when they both sleep.

According to a myth told in central Australia, twin lizards created trees, plants, and animals to fill the land. Motherless Romulus and Remus created Rome.

This creative aspect of Phobos and Deimos is not all that obvious, but if an affliction is also the means to heal ourselves, if the clue to wholeness is buried somewhere in the symptom, wanting only our patience to emerge, we are then witness to the remarkable ability of the Psyche to both shield itself and leave a paper trail to follow.

This capacity to experience Self-hood beyond our skins is testimony to the fact that the psyche contains the body rather than the usual contrary view.

”Some think the fish contains the sea, I say the sea contains the fish.” CG Jung

This sea contains all kinds of experiences, both the scary variety replete with teeth and palpitations but also those which are sublime and uplifting.

Victor Frankl tells the following story;

This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here-I am here-I am life, eternal life.’”

When you accept that phobias are meaningful, dreamlike scenarios the unraveling of which can actually help deepen self knowledge and compassion, then, in a wider sense and having faced the terror of being but a speck in a grinder, you also make yourself available to the prospect of being redeemed by Nature, the self that exists outside.

Paranoia and Parapraxis.

Once upon a time there lived a poor couple whose greatest wish was to have a child….

From a small upstairs window in their little cottage, where they could see over a high wall and into a wonderful garden owned by an Enchantress in which there were all manner of exotic and magical plants, the woman spied a great clump of Rampion growing. Rampion is famed for it’s fertile properties and  she set her heart upon having some. So she persuaded her husband to clamber over the wall in dead of night and fetch her a bit.

..which he did.

and the next night too… and the night after that..

..getting quite blase now about his habitual stroll through this strange garden by moonlight to collect Rampion.

Until one evening, in a twinkling, the Enchantress has planted herself in his path, way bigger than he imagined with purple tendrils of electricity snaking about her fingertips.

‘What are you doing’? she asks, in a voice silky with impending malice..

”Er, sorry your Enchantress-ship. I was collecting Rampion for my wife who wishes to conceive a child. Please don’t turn me into anything nasty.”

The Enchantress pondered for a moment, ‘very well, but when the child is born it will be mine,” and then she vanished in a thunder clap leaving the poor man clutching his Rampion and quaking in his boots. On the day the child was born the Enchantress appeared as if by magic and scooped the babe up, ‘I will call her Rapunzel after the Rampion,’ she said and then they were gone..

To say that the Enchantress was an over-protective mother doesn’t quite do justice to her determination that Rapunzel be sequestered from the world. She built a tower in the forest without doors and Locked Rapunzel Up. Occasionally the Enchantress would arrive with supplies and command Rupunzel to lower her lengthy tresses for her to climb up..

‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel let down your golden hair..’

One day the local Prince is riding by and sees all this happening. He’s a tad curious and go’s over to the tower once the Enchantress is gone…

‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel let down your golden hair..’

So, he climbs up and they fall in love… as you might expect. But what happens next is not so expected…

One day the Enchantress visits and as she’s climbing over the balcony Rapunzel inadvertantly blurts, ‘ oh, you are so much more heavy than the Prince,’ and before she realizes it the truth is out. The enraged Enchantress cuts off Rapunzel’s tresses and banishes her to a filthy hovel in some farflung desert place. Then she lies in wait for the Prince.

Slips of the tongue, or ‘paraparaxis’, meaning ‘beyond what is acceptable’, in Greek, can get you into a world of trouble.  The problem with slips of the tongue is that they have a nasty habit of outing unacceptable truths. Its as if the Truth is just busting to find expression. The more unacceptable that Truth is the harder it will push for the light.

which is all very well. But to the person who’s just outed themselves its like having an inner traitor.

My most cringe-worthy slip of the tongue was in the library,  wanting to borrow a reference copy of the ‘Writers and Artists Year Book. The librarian was very attractive and scantily clad in summer heat. I tried my best to ignore the fact, not least of all because a gaggle of old ladies in the doorway were looking me up and down as if to say, ‘we know what you’re thinking you filthy little man..’

So I was on my best behaviour, and doing my utmost to be polite..

‘Good afternoon, do you have a copy of the Writer’s and Arse Tits Year Book?

which brings us to the next order of business, Paranoia. Something Unknown is Doing I Don’t Know What… and it doesn’t seem to have the interests of polite society on its agenda…

The Prince climbs up Rapunzel’s severed locks only to find the Enchantress at the top who wants very much to scrag him. Only by throwing himself from the tower is he saved, though he loses his eyes to the thorny thicket surrounding the tower on his way down.

Paranoia is when you think something is going on but its not. We overlay reality with our own inner pallette to the point that what gets painted is really rather different from what is actually there. The Prince thinks he’s getting Rapunzel but has to deal with the Enchantress instead…

a common male complaint.

He’s bound to feel that some wicked will is working against him. We’re all conditioned by experience to expect the world to respond to us in a particular way. Survival depends on learning who we are from our environment and living up to its expectations even if they are not good for us.

”Instictive forces do not reason. They assume, from the immense weight of their experience,.. that it will serve the individual well to be stabilized according to  initial experience.’. Jean Liedloff.

What this means is that..

‘the design of each individual is a reflection of the experience it expects to encounter… defined by the circumstances to which its antecedents had adapted.” ibid

So the boy who was humiliated by his mother, says to himself que sera sera, this is how it is. He adapts and expects to be humiliated by Life. He will even engineer it if he can, because survival means integrating Expectations, even if that expectation is that you are stupid and will fail.

‘Not so easily do we forget what we learned with our Mother’s milk’. Dostoevsky

The prejudices and assumptions we all have about life serve to create a seamless fit between the peculiarities of childhood and the objective face of a wider and untested Universe later on. Confronting your own paranoia, realising that how things were needn’t be how they are, is a huge wake up that can rob a person of their usual perceptual ability symbolised by the Prince’s blinding.

When I was a kid there was always a sense of something amiss at home that I couldn’t name until one day my father put his hand on my mother’s shoulder and she involuntarily shuddered with disgust. I was shocked. My first thought was, ‘what else is it that I cannot see.” And even though it was disorienting and painful, I grew.

because the painful thing was at least real.

‘Loosening and even fragmenting the internal psychic environment. . . is the ground for the birth and development of higher psychic structure. Disintegration is the basis of developmental thrust upward, the creation of new evolutionary dynamics and the movement of the personality to a higher level.’ Dabrowski

So the prince has to wander blindly about the  kingdom like a beggar until one day, deo concedente, by the will of the gods, he finds Rapunzel in her desert hovel. She recognizes him straight away, embraces him and her hot tears fall upon his eyes which are then restored.

Love heals all wounds.

Both Rapunzel’s parapraxis, which caused so much trouble, and the Prince’s paranoia…more trouble, ultimately serve the individuation of both and bring them together in a very human way unencumbered by the ivory towered inflation of their first encounter.

So slips of the tongue, though embarrassing, serve to bring unconscious material within reach of consciousness; and paranoia, though uncomfortable, helps to air the gap between what we think is happening and what is actually going on whilst continuously encountering the Unknown and being bent into interesting shapes by it.

 

Narcissism and the Bottomless Pit.

In thirty years of practice as a psychotherapist I never came across an indigenous person with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The reason is that native people generally have a way of raising their kids that is  radically different to parents in the ‘civilised’ West.

This does not mean that Western women are bad mothers, but that they have to contend with a split reality endemic in our culture that makes it difficult for baby to cross certain developmental thresholds.

On the one hand the child, as depicted in the majority of psychoanalytic literature, is a voracious power hungry little monster who battles mother for dominance and has to be brought to heel at all costs.

”Babies have become a sort of enemy to be vanquished by mother…on the premise that every effort should be made to force baby to conform when it ’causes’ work and ‘wastes’ time.’ J. Liedloff

On the other hand, and by way of compensation, we have the effusive and liberal face of Dr Spock, whose sales of his book ‘Baby and Childcare’, come second only to the Bible on the best seller list. Spock advocated ‘childcentric’ households which effectively have children ruling the roost. Detractors claim he cultivated Narcissism in millions as the most trusted name in childcare and parenting since 1940 and even hold him personally responsible for the moral decline of  western culture.

”When a society becomes out of control, it is because its members elevate self-indulgence and lack self-control…and [have] come to see gratification as a right.” R. Bradley.
.
 These radically polarised veiws of parenting presented by Freud and Spock, often operating without reference to one another under the same roof, have something strangely in common. Both the liberal, anti-authoritarian mandate of currying entitlement in children and the cold hearted philosophy of ‘you did it to yourself’ inherent in Freudian theory, marginalised the fact that women have been having babies for seven million years without the input of opinionated men in lab coats.
.
 Both men’ knew better’ than the feminine soul. To the extent that these theories were imposed upon women’s natural instincts, their innate knowing, their connection to their own mothers and to the Divine Feminine that presided over childbirth and motherhood, so too was their role undermined, ancient wisdom eroded and intrinsic understanding of what was right and proper, subverted and injured.
.
So whilst it may be true that excessive permissiveness fosters narcissistic tendencies and a sense of entitlement, it is also the case that narcissistic wounds are inevitable when the bond between mother and child is intruded upon by someone who thinks they know better than Nature herself, irrespective of the received ‘wisdom’ under consideration.
.
You’re probably familiar with the educational maxim ‘would you teach a fish to climb a tree?’ but we forget that its even more undermining to teach a fish to swim.
.
A centiped was happy, quite!
Until a toad in fun
Said, ‘pray which leg follows which?
This raised her doubts to such a pitch
She fell exhausted in a ditch,
Not knowing how to run.
.
“If we have learnt certain [things] so that they have sunk below the level of conscious control, then if we try to follow them consciously we very often interfere with them so badly that we stop them”. Carl Popper.
.
It follows that if mother has it instilled in her that she doesn’t know her job  without instruction from a clipboard wielding MD then baby will be similarly confused and struggle with developmental tasks, understandably preferring the relative safety of remaining partly fused with mother in a state of  ‘symbiotic omnipotence’. (M. Kahn).
.
This interupts the process of separation and healthy growth, preventing the child from crossing the threshold associated with ‘symbol formation’. This is significant because it is symbol formation that is responsible for the experience of others as persons in their own right, and for the development of values associated with feelings about others having their own purpose and destiny. The child can get eternally caught  in the concrete thinking of symbolic equations where, for instance, worth is measured in terms of money,  loveability in terms of sexual conquest, power in terms of domination of others, all the things we recognise as symptoms of NPD.
.
‘No-one loves me, because you don’t wipe my chin.’ Liedloff.
.
The figurative representation of ideas, conflicts or wishes cannot be experienced and so metaphorical notions of honour, faithfullness, duty, empathy and so on remain conceptual ideas rather than lived and experienced realities…
.
”from which intellectualism is only to ready to emancipate itself.” C.G. Jung
.
This is most obvious in our relationships because Narcissism does not really experience the Other as such. Their humanity remains conceptual. The notion that others have equal rights is an abstract idea to be rationally concluded without actually being lived.
.
Racism and sexism are the most common outcome of such a mind set, but the irony is that the Narcissist has equal trouble conceiving of ‘his own’ in fully human terms unless they remain entirely joined at the hip. Humanity is not experienced, it is deduced, much as Socrates ‘worked out’ that one day he would die.
.
‘Socrates is a man. Men are mortal. Therefor Socrates will die.’
.
On the basis of such abstract deduction ordinary instinctual care for one another is occluded. One’s own self barely exists in its own right, how shall another fare any better?
.
The developmental threshold of symbol formation affords not only the recognition of the otherness of the Other, it also affords value and significance to the otherness of oneself, in other words to the fantasies, intuitions and aspirations emerging from the archetypal layers of the psyche that take over the job of feeding the child, as it were, from within.
.
This leads to a lack of faith, not only in others but towards life itself which cannot be trusted to provide. The child becomes a consumer…
.
‘clinging to objects and people, investing them with magical powers, ferocious in [the] demand to possess and control.” Liedloff
.
Asking Narcissism to share is thus experienced as an attack on all that is holy because money and resources have been imbued with a kind of spiritual manna. Losing hegemony over it is tantamount to desecration. The paranoid tendency of the Narcissist  is not simply that someone is out to get him, but that all he holds sacred is under attack.
.
And so the predominant experience of life is one of being a victim, no matter how much one has, nor how much there is available. It is like being a planet without a sun, or worse, having a black hole to revolve around which threatens to drain and crush at every turn. Without the inner ‘other’, there is nothing to mediate the dark forces of the cosmos.
.
”Our connection with a sacred centre [gives] a sense of real existence that counters the terror of chaos and nothingness, helps [a person] find their bearings and makes order of the Universe’. Bizint
 .
Since what we cannot integrate is invariably projected it will seem to those who stub their toe on at the threshold of symbol formation that some illegitimate other has stolen the key to happiness. He lives, not only in a state of lack but as if his divine inheritance is being withheld. And because he’s in the bind of having to deny what he needs, his lack and being witheld from is acted out in the world, which perhaps explains the conundrum of how it is possible for the richest and greatest nation in the world to sweep one of its most powerful men to high office on the shirt tails of the  slogan, ‘make America great again’, as though it were a mere dispossesed guttersnipe on the fringes of the stage.

Attack on the Child.

In order to understand the pathological need for wealth, fame and consumption that typifies Western Culture, we need to look further than mere greed. Having the moral high ground is not enough. You might still miss what’s so interesting about wanting more than you need….

The Rule of Intention says that the way things pan out has to do with the intentions of those who are involved.  If children in their millions are starving then someone is witholding the spoon. If thousands have no education then that’s by design. If families are living on the streets someone put them there.

So then what does it mean that we collectively aspire to more than we need? Why is it that we regard excessive consumption differently from obesity? You’d be shocked if a person’s goal was to gain a hundred pounds…

and yet

”We are screwing the planet to make solar powered bathroom thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.” G Monbiot.

Are we then simply diplaying our wealth? Is there some arcane connection between wanton destruction and attractiveness? I think not, but whatever the answer it  lies deeper than our greed or stupidity.

Symptoms of dis-ease are never arbitrary or simply unfortunate. They are the unconscious expression of something yet to be named. There is hidden meaning in desperately pursuing stuff you don’t actually need, stuff whose production enslaves and destroys into the bargain. Calling it addiction doesn’t quite work either, despite the added caveat to greed that there is more at work than mere self indulgence.

Believing we can convert the rhythms of work into cash so that real life might then begin may feel worth the price to be paid by aliveness, but what many of us do in our leisure time is just more of the very same consuming of life from which we most need to a break. In our millions we become even further absorbed…..

”in the electronic reproduction of life, the passive consumption of the twittering screen.” A Watts.

So we save up for our hols, to get away from it all, when proper enjoyment can get under way, only to find that it too is also somehow pasteurised, with boxes to tick and schedules to fill. Been there, done that…  We wait to be amused, wonder what’s  next and if we’ve had our money’s worth.

All of which..

”gives rise to a culture devoted not to survival but to the actual destruction of life.” ibid

So is our devouring of life a form of collective suicide, a Chomskian rushing to the precipice?

No, its scarier than that.

It is an attack, not just upon ourselves, but on our children. The planet that their parents are pillaging is, after all, their inheritance. The spiritual malaise and attendant acting out of the developed world is far greater, far more malicious, than mere apathy, denial or disinterest.

”Once you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Sherlock Holmes.

If we want to understand consumerism and its attended ravaging of the planet we need to ask what it is that people are really hoping for with the must-have item on their bucket list. Irrespective of its concretisation, the new car, the fancy vacation, the latest gadgetry, what people seem to be striving for is a sense of worth, of being safe and held and fed.

Collectively we are seeking the in-arms experience of infancy which, as a culture, we have simply not yet had.

‘When the expected does not take place, corrective or compensatory tendencies make an effort to restore stability.’ J. Liedloff.

Consumerism is a parody of contented infant satiation. We want life dribbling down our chin. We want to be in the ‘lap of luxury’. We want the safety of maternal embrace whose alternative is the poor substitute of being gripped by her dark and compulsive sister, (mater)ialism.

‘The infant (like the guru) lives in the eternal now, in a state of bliss; the infant out of arms is in a state of longing, the bleakness of an empty Universe. Want is all there is..’ ibid

Amassing the unnecessary to the detriment of  life on Earth looks entirely crazy until we consider it in a symbolic light, the unfulfilled need of a culture seeped in denial about what is truly indispensible. Mother.

This denial reaches its acme in psychoanalytic theory with Freud’s Drive Conflict theory which entirely marginalises Mother as relevant to baby’s health or illness.

According to this theory dis-ease is not down to how we are treated, whether we are held and loved, but on dysfunctional ‘object relations’. You did it to yourself, a doctrine of victim blaming that also constitutes the final eradication of Mother’s relevance to life. In thirty years I have never found Freud to use the word ‘mother’ even once.

This denigration of life’s most important role impoverishes our entire culture but it does far more and has consequences you might not have considered.

Not only does the dominant form of spirituality in Western Culture fail to nourish, but our anxious preoccupation with and eternal focus on the future with its promise of salvation…at some point…does have the appeal  that the indiscretions of today may be swept under the carpet, but in the process of ducking conscience we are also bound to be gripped with envious spoiling for those who are able to be in the moment where real life happens, where all bliss, joy, gratitude and celebration are to be found.

Much of the West’s ferocious subjugation of the ‘childlike’ third world has to do with this same improbable truth, that we envy them. Despite their poverty they seem to have something we do not, a living for today where the real riches of life are to be found. And so they are happy. For all our wealth and power in the West we are miserable. Our worrying about tomorrow means we cannot  enjoy our mountain of stuff  today because all enjoyment is Now.

I once asked an African man on a dusty savannah roadside in tropical heat when the bus he was waiting for would arrive. ‘Today”, he answered contentedly.  By contrast and half a world away, commuters on Stuttgart railway station platform follow the digital clock ticking over, . At the exact same moment they all look in disappointed unison at their watches and turn to stare down the track as if they were practicing impatience for a show.

Our collective obsession with time and tommorow means that the aliveness gets sucked out of today.  We become chorus lines to celebrity others whose lives have somehow become more real than our own. The togetherness, the gratitude for simply being alive can’t be entered into and like the uninvited guest, ‘Now’ turns cold, vengeful and wooden.

”Unlived life will not sit idly on the shelf, it will turn round and bite you.” M.L. von Franz.

If a sense of Self that transcends self-interest can’t be embodied it will be projected. The recipients will invariably be the next generation who are as yet untutored in guilt, whose feeling of belonging has yet to be eroded, who have yet to know alienation.

and who are handy…

The child..

‘will arouse certain longings in the adult. . . longings which relate
to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality
which have been blotted out. . .’ C. G. Jung.

Whilst we idealise, cosset and run around endlessly with compensatory gestures of slavish devotion,  so too do we silently envy and spoil. The secret bit about narcissistic brats is that they were made that way by parents who first loaded them down with not only their own unfulfilled expectations but with all the potentialities in today that we can’t shoulder for the sake of insuring ourselves against tommorow.

The horror of growing old and dying without first having properly lived is all too much and become split in our affections.

I will pat you on the head whilst I poison your earth.

My father personally favoured random electrocution as a means to express his envious grievance at my blossoming youth. Bare mains wires ran down the walls both inside and outside my room. They would set window frames and brickwork alive, especially when it rained. You might say that most parents are not so pathological and yet the quest for more than you need means you have to go out and take it off someone else, perpetual warmongering for which youth in their millions are most necessary.

I once spent three days as part of a tiny force of  green berets sitting under a tree waiting for the go ahead to take on 300 defected enemy soldiers who’d changed their mind and taken their new commander hostage as a prelude to melting back into the bush with shiny new G3 semi automatics. We all knew it was a suicide mission should the order finally came through, but the predominant feeling amongst us was one of quiet acceptance, the calm of sacrificial beasts under a stone knife, as though fulfilling some preordained narrative.

Saturn is eating his children.

Behind closed doors it’s usually less flamboyant than electrified bedrooms or going to live in a war zone but after three decades of being a psychotherapist I have to say that everyone who ever came to see me had the same issue. Their true self had been attacked and their destinies subverted by someone they were entitled to trust.

Which is why having more than you need is a form of poison. Its not just greedy. It’s a blow aimed at those who would be better stewards of this earth than ourselves, our children.

this article contains excerpts from my new book ‘Abundant Delicious.. on attaining your heart’s desire’. https://andywhiteblog.com/2016/06/11/abundant-delicio…ot-off-the-press/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monkey Business.

When I was a kid growing up in Zambia we used to go visit a local zoo/nature reserve outside Lusaka called ‘Mundawanga’. I privately called it ‘Mundawanka’ because the Vervet monkeys were always masturating…

and would look you bang in the eye while they were at it.

There were a dozen or so males of various ages in a cage the size of your living room, all with their dicks out…..

all day…

every day.

In their cramped and unnatural captivity, all pressed together in a space not suitable territory for one, they had found a neurotic solution to their claustrophobic situation. After all, as every good Vervet knows, the correct behaviour when encounetring someone having a wank is not to encroach. Leave them alone and let them get on with it.

Space and separation…

which is good..

But rubbing yourself raw…

not good.

The monkeys were also great thieves. Loss of territory had led to loss of honour, relatedness and rules of engagement. Everyone was fair game.  Woe betide any young child with a bar of Aero who thinks he can go put his fingers through the mesh and hang on the wire cage. They know about pockets and will fleece you something rotten.

The Single System system, concentrated power in concentrated space, is just like that monkey cage. They all have their dicks out and will rob you in a heartbeat.

Concentrated power in concentrated space breeds paranoia throughout the cage and the need for space which, barring despair, only compulsive behaviour will give you.

Back in the day, some Pacific Islanders ritually killed their kings once in a while. Any one who wanted to be king could nominate themselves. One would be chosen and for a year he would enjoy all kinds of inflated priviledges and being above the law…..

until your twelve months is up.

Then you get handed a sharp knife. Sometimes you get to have sex at the shaky end of a log pile.

And then they start over..

which seems like a very sensible thing to do.

Culturally, the killing of the king brought fruitfullness to the land and life to the people. Psychologically, it induced an encounter with the archetype of Kingship itself, for anyone can step forward. It would be both terrifying in its awesome power and seduction, overwhelming with its fantasy of limitless possibility, acrid with the fumes of death…

…like Galadriel’s encounter with the Ring.

which is why we prefer the Single System system whether its skull cap or dog collar. We can depend upon it to help us suppress our experience of numinosity for the sake of our ontological security.

‘Religion is a defense against the experience of god.’ CG Jung.

We need our all-powerful and oppressive Caesars who constantly behave as though they were above the law, like Gods, so that we need not differentiate too closely between what to render to one and what to render to the other. We do this despite the loss to our own inner journeying and the raw rub of eternally marking time that this will cost us.

It is our version of the Vervet’s neurotic solution. The loss of inner creative space that is the price of abdicating a personal relationship with Psyche leads to endless masturbation, thievery and the kind of frenetic apathy, the aggrieved restlessness that is the curse of any child who is both intruded upon by a parent/state/zoo keeper whilst simultaneously being abandoned by it….

the monkey in the equation develops a quite understandable conscientious objection to reality.

Any moment that might still retain a bit of it must be evaded with all speed..

‘and so he mounts his horse and gallops furiously in every direction… ruthless in the destruction of potentials that must mature in their own form and season..’ F Wickes.

The effect on relatedness and creativity is catastrophic….

I once lived in a tiny English village in which there was a little old lady with a title and a massive house. She had been raised in a cage even more gilded than mine. Her capacity for relatedness was shot to pieces. She was a millionaire but the neighbour’s kids had to pay to use her tennis court. I fixed her flat tyre for which she immediately thrust a bottle of wine at me, unable to bear the bonds of simple co-operation. I had to be paid off directly.

Her grasp of other’s needs was catastrophically warped. A local man found a disraught motorist at the side of the narrow lane that wound steeply up through the village. He was clearly distressed.

‘Are you all right?’

”No, I broke down at the foot of the hill but a little old lady offered to tow me up.”

‘Oh dear, you didn’t accept?’

”Yes.”

‘Much damage?’

…..  All the energy that might have gone into something nourishing builds up and turns back on whatever, or whoever, is handy. The dissociated potential has grown horns and a tail. Genuine feeling or inspiration gets dumbed down into moods, knee jerk reactions and wild low gear ratios.

though the smooth and satisfied surface of the inner millpond that is the inheritance of God’s chosen people remains unruffled.

But without being affect-ed, there is no affect-ion.

No being rooted in love.

and so we too become masturbating monkeys having passed up…

‘the troublesome germ of individual king/queen ship.’ F Wickes.

Around about the time that humanity started caging monkeys they also started caging kids.

sacrificial dormitories.

Mine really did have cages on the windows. Grenade screens. Our pre-eminence as the kids of the White elite rulers made attack from African terrorists (people who didn’t like us taking over their country) a very real threat. I spent many a night standing guard over other sleeping teens, armed with a lee-enfield .303 rifle and listening for any sound.

Bling has this tradition of sending the kids away, as a display of wealth and obeisance to the centralised power. The very real suffering involved propitiates the Gods and eases parental paths to greatness.

Children become fetishistic objects sacrificed on the altar of Bling. Inner Nobility is projected onto glittering others and then chased after. And you do it yourself. You buy into it. I remember my initial pride and the look in people’s eyes when I told them where I went to school. The lurch of respect, the sage nodding, the rush of power whilst simultaneously knowing, completely and entirely, that it was a crock of shit.

where we wanked and stole.

If not each other’s stuff then each other’s pride and dignity, tutored in deception and some being more equal than others.

We think we’re a child friendly society but along with the chihuahua…

”we have the fairly universal civilised belief that a child’s impulses need to be curbed in order to make him social.” J. Liedloff.

This is germane even at the liberal end of the spectrum. We have the basic..

”assumption that the child has an antisocial nature, in need of manipulation to become socially acceptable.” ibid

When this fails, Freud’s infantile sexuality theory sets the seal on the stupid thing breaking itself. Parental influence and cages are written out of the equation. The Church loves it because it chimes so well with original sin. And so for the first time in two thousand years Church and Science agree on something.

You are the bad seed.

So that’s how you will grow.

But not as fast as we can build correctional facilities to house yo’ ass.

 

 

 

Loss and Shame .

The bottomless, shameful pit

of the unmothered child,

trying to claw whatever he can to staunch his wound…..

seemed to me to be best expressed recently by the aside in some article I read that Donald Trump had claimed to own 9 billion when he only had 4.

Only 4 billion?!

For shame!

And suddenly despite every fibre of your body screaming out against it you start feeling sorry for the man.

Only 4 billion..what an embarrassing out, dude.

His ability to make people sorry for him and the dramatic style employed by the man are narcissistically generated strategies of defence against shame or the prospect of shame. Like the flares released by fighter jets to put incoming missiles off the scent.

Problem is those flares are only partially effective..

and so you have to take evasive manouveres

alla time..

Shame is very different from Guilt. Guilt is about what you have done, so it can be atoned in some way. There’s always some possibility of redemption.

But developmentally deeper and more ancient than the Guilt and Atonement story is The Story of Shame and for feeling bad about what you Are, let alone whatever it was you did.

The Gnostics preserved some ancient fragments of the pre-biblical Myth of Sophia. They are an allegory of the degradation of the Goddess.

”She fell into the hands of bad men who passed her between them. Some raped her. Others seduced her with gifts. She became a prostitute. Overcome with shame she no longer dared to leave her abusers.” The Exegesis of the Soul

When the sacred feminine at the back of mothering ceases to be collectively honoured, what will the way she holds her child communicate to that infant?
What a baby experiences of its mother is what baby takes itself to be. If the mirror is  seen ‘through a glass darkly’ then what can baby make of its own reality?

The dishonour to the feminine becomes baby’s dishonour. His shame.

An’ yo 4 billion will NEVER be enough.

Balint calls it ‘the basic fault’. This gives rise to RD Laing’s ‘Divided Self’ or Lacan’s, ‘paranoid alienation’ all of which needs soothing with Winnicott’s ‘transitional objects’.
But not all cultures experience this. Liedloff (1986) describes the child rearing  of the Yekuana Indians in Venezuela and notes,

‘they grow up not experiencing any gap or having any empty space in themselves. They do not spend their entire lives, (as we do) trying to prove they exist or making up for the missing sense of self.’
Crucially for the Yekuana, Wanadi, the sky God, has a good relationship with his consort, the Goddess of the Nadir who lives in the bowels of the earth. She is symbolised as a four headed snake crowned with horns. Four-foldness represents wholeness. As snake she is eternally self replenishing and her horns denote divine power.

This earth goddess animates Nature.  The Yekuana  experience all acts of Nature as participating in the body of the Goddess. Motherhood and being with children is a sacred communion with Nadir. And so they do not experience paranoid alienation.
We are tempted to describe certain phenomena, alienation, paranoid anxiety, anomie, bad breasts and the like as though they were of universal significance rather than the culturally specific expression of something now passed out of memory but still so faithfully acted out over time they seem intrinsic to human nature.

In my view they are  outcome of  deep and profound spiritual loss. Yahweh  banishes Hokmah/Sophia  from the divine stage just after the time of Solomon (3000BC) and this is the last time in Judeo-Christian literature that we hear of Her without the new bride’s curses being thrown at her heels.

Given Her place in our imagination for the eighty thousand years or more before that and we’re scarcely over blowing our noses.

Of course the stamping of  ash and bone into the sacred places to eternally desecrate them was a bit unfortunate.

And the, you know, all the hacking down of stuff.

Yes, and the, you know..

killings

We are the children of cosmic divorce who now live with daddy. We don’t see mummy anymore. And nor do we have feelings about it.

But we do hit each other a lot..

and break each other ‘tings..
At the same time as Yahweh was tipping Sophia/Hokmah into the sea the Assyrian God Marduk slays the Goddess Tiamat and the Sumerian Enlil deposes the goddess Nammu. It happened so long ago we are only dimly aware of it, but like the early and forgotten traumas of our own individual childhoods we still collectively experience the consequences at a symptomatic, visceral level. We collectively mistrust the body and demonise the instincts formerly championed by Sophia/Hokmah.

Henri Wallon uses the term ‘confiscation’ (Wallon 1949) to describe the emptiness that seems to be, from a western point of view, an intrinsic part of the developmental process from true to false self that is a substantial region in the underbelly of western civilisation. Confiscation implies that something once present has been lost or taken away and indeed it has. Baby has yet to learn of Yahweh’s divine truculence but soon gets wind from the non verbal cues of shame and rejection intruded in mother. And like all babies he holds himself responsible for the split he experiences in mother and begins to identify with her  humiliation.

Confiscation is the felt result. ‘The loss which lies at the heart of confiscation’, says Berman (1989), ‘is no small matter. It amounts to a revolution of consciousness the crucial feature of which is the decision to mistrust the evidence of our senses.’ ie Nature.
Baby renounces the body as a way of knowing herself, sacrificing her own capacity to apprehend reality for one now rooted in shame.

With the loss of the continuum  to the divine feminine, not only is the Universe suddenly unsafe but we ourselves cease to experience ourselves as trustworthy and have to compensate for it to the point of parody.

 

The Continuum Concept.

Jean Liedloff wrote a great book called, ‘The Continuum Concept’. She describes in detail the process by which we lose our connection to Nature.

The Continuum, based on instinct and rooted in the body, has been interrupted.

Babies are born with inherant expectations.

top of the list….

that the mother/baby continuum is sacred…

but it ain’t… no mo’

”When the expected does not take place, corrective or compensatory tendencies make an effort to restore balance.”

Like Gilgamesh building de Mother’s bones into him walls….

which just makes things worse because those compensatory gestures have to run forever in order to maintain equilibrium..

which mean that…

”deprivation… will be maintained indiscriminantly as part of development. Instictive forces do not reason. They assume that it will serve the individual to be stabilised according to initial experience.”

that not a good thing…

Not if baby’s experience is that access to mother is restricted…

By her ‘avin no place of honour.

”…a mindless terror of silence. The motionlessness. He screams. Afire from head to foot with want, with desire, with intolerable impatience… He listens.. he opens and closes his fist. He rolls his head from side to side. Nothing helps, it is unbearable.”

Could we compare the experiences of the infant state, Israel?

Being lost in the Desert….

crying into the wilderness…   rending  garments and gnashing teath…with tears and lamentations and ‘wherefore art thou…..?’

For the first time people want borders on their land and start to fight over it, not because there’s not enough to go around but because a defuse panic of disenfranchisment is sweeping consciousness with the absence of Mum. The land is now a part-object, the down graded receptacle for the experience of the divine feminine, and land-to-have rather than Nature-who-provides.

Suddenly there’s a limit on plenty.

If  the Principle of Relatedness is repressed, all kinds of ontological insecurities will rush to the surface. And though, ostensibly, the person has become perhaps more competent and single minded, underneath they are clingy, vulnerable and controlling. The need for ownership it generates and the use of people as a means to an end can never be sated because the maw it is being used to fill is not of this world.

And the danger is not simply that I immediatly make war on my neighbour. That is the least of my worries. No, it’s that I’m liable to go to war with myself.

Capacity to hold together in times of stress -reduced.

Capacity for inner conflict resolution -reduced.

Capacity to use reason -reduced.

Compassion for self -reduced.

Of course we’re anxious. The inner facets of our psyches are actually less well hinged together than they might be. We need therapists like no other culture. Western Civilization is ontologically riven in its foundations. A fault line that gives rise to the eternal nameless anxiety of our age. Something isn’t quite right. A vague apprehension of having lost… something. An emptiness.

The perennial issues bought to the consulting room, though each is unique in its content, all have the grey tolling of self-estrangement, the anxiety of being un-held by the universe, the unnamed longing and creeping depression that was never supposed to be part of priviledge.

What we’re suffering from is a kind of divine homesickness, of redeeming the dark brother and revaluing the Mother, of really feeling in its proper context what we’re missing…

so that it can be different……

But we don’t because then we’d see who we are and have to act accordingly.

Which is tough..

and so we pretend its not a big deal.

back inna soup.

”The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” S. Kierkegaard.

Not knowing who you are is a lesser demon, one that can almost be house trained by comparison.

We can try to shore up not being who we are, but it takes increasing effort, lashings of co-dependence and covert agreement to a sado-masochistic arrangement thereafter….

which can be useful.

excuse me…?

If a person can’t be clear about who they are, if the temenos created by the Great Mother in which autonomy can safely be explored without loss is then cracked, and I can’t talk to me very well without turning into bits on the kitchen floor..

then definite roles and rules are life-savers.

Hurting and being hurt is predicated on someone-hurting and someone-else-being-hurt….. so the collusive blancmange of  the Mutual Admiration Society needn’t swallow you up.

Everyone knows where they are…

Me Tarzan on steroids

… you Jane on valium, and a little love is allowed into play..

Wha..?

Sure, when everyone is really clear about their roles, as limiting as they might be then anxiety is quelled because everyone knows what the rules are. And when anxiety is quelled a little love might be allowed. Its constricted somewhat but still a creative solution to the problem of how to be together without getting devoured.

I’m not into allat kinky stuff man.

S/M is rarely found at the flamboyant end of the scale. It has a mundane cousin far more common or garden. Circles of domestic spite, dumping and guilt tripping, that serve without fail to create difference and sharply defined identities. Doesn’t really matter what it is , so long as you’re being can be reconfirmed for the umpteenth time.. and if relatedness has to be sacrificed on the altar of ontological security…..

You wonder why the masochist stays, forgetting how much identity and emotion there is in being done to with a clean conscience.